Olive Oil Actually Got Cheaper. The Bottle With the Brand Name Didn't.

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-07-25 · 5 min read

₪39.90–59.90 — The price of the identical 750ml bottle of Yad Mordechai olive oil (Jezreel Valley) across chains today — a ~50% gap on the exact same barcode, while this summer's headlines celebrate other bottles at ₪9.90-16.40. Superclear data, July 2026

This summer it's hard to miss a headline declaring that olive oil has finally gotten cheaper. Last month, Kipa published a price comparison finding imported olive-oil bottles at just ₪16.40 at the discount chain Hatzi Chinam, and in early May Maariv reported genuine promotions at ₪9.90-10 per bottle at Rami Levy and Shufersal Deal. After two years in which olive oil was one of the clearest symbols of Israel's cost-of-living crisis — with bottles that hit ₪60-70 at the peak — that sounds like real, tangible relief.

We checked our own data on the exact same bottle, but from the most recognizable Israeli brand in the category: Yad Mordechai. It hasn't gotten there.

How prices got this high in the first place

The background is a genuine crisis: starting in 2023, the global olive harvest shrank, especially in Spain — the world's largest exporter — while Israeli production costs jumped, and cases of imported olive oil failing local standards surfaced here too. Per Hidabroot, a liter of olive oil in Israel climbed to about ₪57 by mid-2024, at the peak of the crisis. Strauss, which makes Yad Mordechai and holds the largest share of the category, announced a second price cut within a year in November 2025 — another roughly 10% reduction, following a sharp drop in the cost of Spanish raw material, off a price of about ₪45.90 a bottle at the time (Calcalist). Per that report, Yad Mordechai's market share had already eroded from 17% to 11.3% over the past year, mostly to private labels that had grabbed about 29% of the category and sell for ₪19.90-29.90.

In February 2026, Dr. Hezi Gur-Mizrahi, writing in Maariv, updated the picture: global commodity prices had fallen about 42% from their peak, but Israeli retail prices had dropped only 15-25% — describing "two parallel worlds": cheap imported oil at ₪16.90-34.90 versus Israeli-made oil at ₪50-57 (Maariv). Per Hidabroot, a cut in import tariffs on olive oil accelerated the process, pulling the average price down to about ₪37 a liter, with budget options around ₪26 — alongside roughly ₪30 million in government subsidies for Israeli farmers hurt by the increased import competition. Worth noting: both of those pieces ran more than 90 days ago and are included here purely as background for understanding the trend — not as fresh news.

The real promotion, and whose bottle it's on

The deals starring in this summer's headlines — ₪16.40 at Hatzi Chinam, ₪9.90-10 at Rami Levy and Shufersal Deal — are almost always on private labels or cheap imported brands, and usually come with strings attached: a minimum purchase, a quantity cap, or a time-limited one-off deal. Per Maariv, Shufersal Deal's promotion required a ₪150 minimum purchase and was capped at two bottles per customer. And even where the deal is real rather than a marketing trick, Kipa reports that in that same roundup, one chain actually raised its price on a competing brand the very same week — proof, per the outlet, of targeted competitive positioning rather than a category-wide discount.

What our own index shows on Yad Mordechai, right now

We checked the exact bottle in our current data: Yad Mordechai olive oil (Jezreel Valley), 750ml. As of our latest scan, the product appears in 36 stores nationwide, and the price ranges from ₪39.90 (Ma'ayan 2000 and Netiv Hesed) to ₪59.90 (City Market) — a gap of about 50% on the exact same barcode. The 500ml version of the same product shows a similarly shaped gap: ₪34.90 to ₪49.90.

Two things stand out here. First: neither of the chains reported to be running the cheapest promotions — Rami Levy and Shufersal — even appears in the list of stores selling the Yad Mordechai bottle at all. They're likely simply pushing their own house-brand oil instead, exactly the private-label squeeze described in the Calcalist piece on Yad Mordechai's eroding market share. In other words: the "market-shaking" promotions in the headlines aren't really competing against the olive oil most Israelis actually recognize by name — they're just moving shoppers to an entirely different brand.

Second: Superclear's priciness index, which compares an identical basket across chains, ranks Ma'ayan 2000 and Netiv Hesed as cheap chains (roughly 6-8% below the national median) and both City Market variants as expensive ones (roughly 4-7% above median) — an overall gap of about 15 percentage points between those extremes. But on this specific olive-oil bottle, the gap runs to 50% — three to four times wider than the overall gap between those very same chains. That's the same pattern we've seen before in Superclear's data on other single products: a chain's general position on the priciness ladder guarantees nothing about any one specific item — and olive oil, likely because of how volatile it's been these past two years, sits at the extreme end of that pattern.

What this means at the register

The drop in olive-oil prices is a real story, not a media invention — the global backdrop (a better harvest, lower tariffs) is genuine, and Strauss really has cut its price twice in a year. But the "price war" the headlines describe plays out almost entirely at the cheap, private-label end of the shelf, usually in deals capped by time and quantity. If you're buying the bottle with the recognizable name on it — Yad Mordechai, for instance — the gap between ₪39.90 and ₪59.90 depends almost entirely on which chain you're standing in, not on any global price collapse. It's worth checking the actual price before trusting a headline that claims to speak for you.

Figures are current as of Superclear's latest daily scan (July 25, 2026) and reflect prices the chains themselves publish. A single low price may be a one-off promotion.

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